While one Catholic school community in the Diocese of Wilmington prepares to say goodbye to a leader who boosted enrollment by 65 percent over five years, another is welcoming that same administrator to launch a new effort to bring Catholic secondary education back to Dover and vicinity.
Tom Fertal is leaving his job as president at Saint Mark’s High School on June 1 and will turn directly to an effort in Dover to launch a high school serving the community of Church of the Holy Cross and beyond in Kent County, Delaware. He will be president of the new Holy Cross High School that has a planned opening of September 2025 with 9th and 10th graders, eventually growing to a full, four-year school.
“Obviously, I absolutely have loved the journey of the last five years,” Fertal said in an interview with The Dialog. “We set out on a mission to reinvigorate and renew Saint Mark’s. With enrollment, a capital campaign, new courses … things are phenomenal. It’s always going to be work in progress.”
He said the chance to start a new school was something he could not turn away.
“The opportunity to literally craft and design a school program from the ground up is an amazing opportunity, professionally and personally.”
Stephen DiGennaro, current principal at Saint Mark’s, will serve as interim president, according to Lou De Angelo, diocese superintendent of schools. DiGennaro had announced earlier this year that he was leaving his job as principal but has agreed to stay on as president until a replacement for Fertal is found.
“We join the Saint Mark’s community in its gratitude to Mr. Fertal for his almost five years of service to the high school as principal and then president,” De Angelo in a statement. “We wish him many blessings in his future endeavors.”
Fertal’s tenure at Saint Mark’s will be remembered in part for its considerable enrollment increase. As of Oct. 1, Saint Mark’s enrollment was 829 students. It was 501 when he arrived in 2019.
The return of a Catholic high school to the Dover area fills a void left by the 2020 closure of St. Thomas More Academy, which shuttered in June 2020 shortly after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. It had already suffered from an unsustainable enrollment drop. After 22 years, St. Thomas More student enrollment dropped below 50 students in its final year.
The original Holy Cross High School in Dover was the forerunner to St. Thomas More Academy in Magnolia and was a parish-run school under the direction of the diocesan Catholic Schools Office until its closure in 1987.
This Holy Cross High School will be different, leaders of the effort to launch the school say.
“A group of us saw the need and wanted to determine the interest,” said Dr. Wayne Thomas, a local dentist and Holy Cross parishioner who currently has four children attending Holy Cross elementary school. He said a group of eight community members led by Dover area builder Brian Lessard decided to look more closely at the idea.
The group hired Meitler, a Wisconsin-based consultant with experience in developing Catholic schools. The consultant’s report indicated 98 percent of current families at Holy Cross elementary would send their kids to the new Catholic high school. As of Oct. 1, 339 students were registered at the elementary school.
The independent, private Catholic school will be overseen by a board of local stakeholders who made hiring a president one of their priorities after the commissioned report concluded there was interest in the effort among members of the community.
The school will be affiliated with Holy Cross parish but the exact location is still being evaluated, Thomas said. He said it will start with a $4 million dollar endowment to support operations and provide financial aid to students.
Thomas said the school can expect at least 29 students per class, according to the report, and hiring a principal will be one of Fertal’s first tasks for the school’s president-principal model.
Fertal and Thomas said the plan gained approval from Bishop Koenig earlier this year.
Thomas said the COVID pandemic and social trends have highlighted some of the advantages of Catholic schools for Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
“Culturally, a lot has changed,” he said. “Political agendas, concerns about morality, discipline. More people see the value of what we’re used to in schools – a safe environment, good culture. They want what the Catholic school environment brings.”
Fertal, 56, has been commuting from his home in Lancaster County, Pa., but said he and his wife, Patty, plan to relocate to the Dover area. They have six children, the youngest of whom is currently in high school.
Fertal has been a Catholic school educator for 28 years. He has served as principal of Lancaster Catholic High School and president of Cardinal O’Hara High School, both in Pennsylvania, before arriving at Saint Mark’s in 2019.
“I was not looking, but I go where the spirit moves,” Fertal said. “This is an opportunity to start from scratch with creativity and innovation — design one from the beginning.
“We will be doing a classical curriculum. It is intense in reading and in writing. Philosophy, Latin. Classical throughout all subject areas. Can you really talk about world history without talking about the Catholic space within that? It’s a deeper, richer curriculum.”
“You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said. “Growing it out to extracurricular activities and athletics. Work with what you have facility-wise and student body-wise. We definitely have an ambitious plan to grow the school and have an ambitious array.
“The beautiful part of starting from scratch is you can integrate the arts, for example, into every student’s curriculum. You’re building from the ground up.
“The list is long, everything from budgets to student handbooks, staffing, job descriptions. And they have to be ready sooner rather than later.”
